Abstract
Students in the Czech Republic have learned at least two foreign languages before they enter university. Although Czech universities' primary and official language is Czech, students are encouraged to learn and use other languages, and universities offer programs in other languages (Sherman, 2020), making universities multilingual environments.
Multilingual speakers may perceive positive language interaction (PPLI, Thompson, 2016) among the languages they have learned, with a clear link to the motivation to learn an additional language (Thompson, 2020; Thompson & Aslan, 2014). This paper presents a study among 50+ multilingual university students who either took a Czech language course organized by the university or participated in a language exchange course (tandem) consisting of a Czech native speaker and an international student.
Written reflections and questionnaires provide data to investigate whether the students perceived positive language interaction and, if so, in what specific language areas (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, or other). The second question explored the interaction of Czech with other languages among the international students in the sample.
The results demonstrate a significant level of PPLI in various language areas and portray the position of the Czech language among the learners of Czech.